


Blueprints

by anti_ela



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-26
Updated: 2013-03-26
Packaged: 2017-12-06 14:03:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/736498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anti_ela/pseuds/anti_ela
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean was built in 1979. In 1983, there was a small fire in his nursery, and he spent the next ten years scraping and replastering until only he can still see where the paint is new, can feel the warp from the heat.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blueprints

Dean was built in 1979. In 1983, there was a small fire in his nursery, and he spent the next ten years scraping and replastering until only he can still see where the paint is new, can feel the warp from the heat. In 1991, someone wrote on the wallpaper, “This burned. What was here is gone.” (Dean wrote it, sleepwalking, but doesn’t remember.) In 2001, the nursery door closes, and Dean spends the next three and a half years ignoring the dark room, the dust, the slight smell of decay.

In 2005, someone takes a sledgehammer to his foundations. He ignores it for a few months—has he not been hurt before?—but the sides of him start to ache, and he needs voices to fill his empty places. He seeks out the child that used to run beneath his eaves, but the child is a man now, and tall. To fit inside of Dean, the man would need to stoop; and Dean, like a good house, rebuilds. He tears down his doors and makes them anew. But the man wants his own house, new and shining, filled with joy.

Dean knows, somehow, that the man means he wants a house that isn’t Dean. And he can understand, can’t he, more than anyone, how a person could need a house without a leaking roof, without crooked stairs, without a warped and lonely nursery? But this was his child, his beloved, in a way that perhaps none but another house could understand. I protected you from the night things! he wants to cry. I kept you dry when it was raining! I twisted so you could stand tall. Has anyone been more to you?

For houses cannot understand that, when you protect your loved ones in every way that matters, they will have bright eyes, and easy smiles, and fervid dreams. They will open your door and walk out into the sunshine. And though they love you, though they are grateful for you during storms, they cannot see how hail has hurt you if you do not show them. They do not innately know. And that is good, Dean Winchester! That means they do not know the hurt of hail, that you are a good house, and strong.

In 2008, Dean collapses beneath the weight of himself. And I rebuild him, brick by brick. I measure twice, cut once; I plane and sand each board of him. I run my hands along his planks and they are smooth as silk, as steel. It takes me years, but I do not mind. I am lost in him. I have breathed so much of his sawdust that at times I think I am him—but no, for I am not a house. I do not shelter, though I wish to. I am no house. I am a man in need of one, however.

I am a man in need of Dean.


End file.
